Are You All Messed Up?
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Text: Ephesians 2:1-10
I am astounded to think that in our day and age redemption is cool again! In a time of somewhat cynical views on religion and faith, even of spirituality, somehow redemption is cool. People are talking about it. We all like a good story of redemption, do we not? Someone who is down and out coming good, somebody who is lost being found, someone who was dismissed being given hope and opportunity, redemption, it's cool again!
If you don't believe me, you clearly have not been watching television! We even have programs now about Redemption Inc. no less, where Kevin O'Leary has very cleverly taken those who are former inmates, who seem down and out and without at hope, and given them an opportunity to improve their lives, and at the end get the gold at the end of the rainbow. Those who are bad become good, and those who are poor become affluent afterwards. Great story!
This was so-much-so that Lorna Dueckin her program Context, the Christian program that has picked up on this theme of redemption because of that show suggests that we are fascinated by it. If you think it is just that show, I suggest you watch American Idol. I do from time to time and I want to know what is happening musically. I watch it and I am amazed! More and more the show airs vignettes of young performers who come from very poor backgrounds or had personal crises and they are want to be participants on Idol to lift themselves up out of the mire that they find themselves in.
Stories with teary-eyed mothers about how little Suzie was a darling little girl but they couldn't afford any luxuries, then suddenly this great world opens up before them! It is a little hokey but it is redemption and we all love it! We eat it up! It is cool. Of course, it has been cool for a long time for Christians. There is nothing nouveau about redemption! We saw it in Job, who lost everything and was restored by God, redeemed. We saw it in Zacchaeus, who was an outcast, who climbed a tree to see Jesus and eventually sits down to have dinner with Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God. Kind of makes you envious of Zacchaeus, doesn't it?
The Apostle Paul was on the road to Damascus, about to put to death some Christians, who he thought were an ungodly lot, only to be met by the Risen Christ and whammo, he is redeemed! An amazing story! We know all about redemption, be it art, history, music, they are full of stories of redemption. You can see it in Shakespeare when Antonio becomes sort of a redemptive figure, saving somebody else from the pit and dragging them out of the mire in The Merchant of Venice.
And if there has ever been a case in the movies where there is redemption, it is Oscar Schindler in that chilling movie, Schindler's List, and you think of somebody who because of what they saw, namely the persecution of Jews, was transformed and changed. We all love and appreciate the denouement of somebody who is lost being found. It is a great story. It captures the imagination.
What the Apostle Paul, or his scribe, who probably wrote The Book of Ephesians, was capturing was that very essence of redemption, not redemption in hokey way, but in a real life drama that was unfolding. The real life drama, according to the writer of Ephesians, is about a cosmic redemption that is taking place and has taken place. It is a cosmic redemption at which God is the centre of the story, both the subject and the object of the story: that God redeems that which is broken and takes that which is fallen and restores it and redeems it.
It is written at a time to Gentiles and this is particularly important, because what the writer of Ephesians is saying is that the Gentile people are now part of the redemptive cosmic story, the cosmic story that of course began with the people of Israel, who were called to redeem the world. Their law was to become the standard whereby righteousness and life was judged. But now, with the coming of Christ, this is now open for the Gentiles, along with their Jewish counterparts in this unfolding cosmic story of redemption.
Most scholars agree and I think that they are right, that Ephesians, particularly this part of it, was written for those who were about to become initiated into the Christian faith, who were themselves to be baptized. It is a catechism for the baptized. The passage reads in such a powerful way because it restores this great wonder of the redemptive story of God.
For Paul, the Gentiles are now part of this great cosmic unfolding story because of the grace of God. But, as you look at this passage, you can't help but be gripped by the contrasts in it. It truly is a redemptive story. It is about those who have been dead in their sins and who are now are alive in Christ. He suggests that these Gentiles have lived outside of God. They had lived a life that was dead - morally spiritually, and ethically - and that this had manifested itself in many different ways.
He even suggests that they had become captive to what he called “the kingdom of the air,” the spirit of the age, the zeitgeist to evil, and that Gentiles hadn't found themselves gripped by the depth of their beliefs, and this was manifested through disobedience, they simply went along with the ways of the world as they had known it: life outside of God.
The picture is dark and gloomy. It is one of death and destruction. It is one of death in its final sense. In many ways it reflects the early part of the Book of Romans, where Paul describes life outside of God, and the Gentiles had been, according to Paul outside of God's covenant. But now they are back in! Now they are alive, and the language that he uses, as depressing as the language of death is, is overpowered by the language of life. He says, “You will now be lifted up. You will be lifted up from the quagmire of your sin and your guilt and you ignorance and your depravity and your following of human nature. You will be lifted up. You'll be lifted up into heavenly places! You will be taken up into the presence of God, and you will be lifted up! “
Why? It is because God loves them. His desire for life for the Gentiles was not out of disdain or hatred or anger, but out of love and compassion. Paul says that is why he sent his son and why Jesus was raised from the dead. Jesus was raised from the dead to lift up those who were dead. Jesus' resurrection was not an end in itself; it was the beginning of life. It was the lifting up of humanity. According to Ephesians, this had been planned from the very beginning of time. This was God's very intention that somehow his son would come and redeem those who were living in death and make them alive: Redemption Inc., God, taking the lost and bringing them home!
I think it is a marvellous story! But it is real life, it is reality. It is not a myth, it is not a legend, it is not a cosmic story, and it is not a mystery. It is there for us to see and it is open to us all. Yet often when I read this I feel for people who have reservations about it and are sceptical about it. Some people who are sceptical about this though, think it doesn't really involve us much, does it? It all seems to be done as if we are not subjects at all and that we have no role to play and it bypasses us as if we simply don't matter. If in fact the cosmic story has gone on and God through God's son has saved God's people, so what does it matter? If it is done, it is done. What role do we have to play?
Then I hear others say, “Is it really necessary? Do we really need redemption? After all, we are pretty righteous people, and compared to most of the people around us I think we are doing pretty well. We seem righteous enough. Oh, we have our bad days, but on the whole, we're pretty righteous. We like to do good things. We get pleasure out of good things. Who needs to be redeemed when they are pretty good?” So they say: “The story has no bearing on my life. I am righteous! God will have to live with it.”
Or they say things like: “Isn't the redemption story deep down only for those who are just a little messed up, you know, people unlike us, people who are down and out, people who have major crises in their lives, people who face death, people who commit crimes, people who live poor and rough, maybe it is for them that this redemption story is told? It doesn't apply to us, because it applies to those who are generally messed up.” It is good for them to them to have a redemption story, just as it is good to have the little vignettes on American Idol. It is redemption for somebody else.
The first objection is, it's redemption in which we do nothing; the second one is that it is redemption we don't need; and the third one is that it is redemption for everyone else. You could not be more wrong. This unfolding story that we have in the Scriptures, this narrative of redemption has a profound effect on us and on our lives and how we live. It has a profound effect on our sense of righteousness and of forgiveness. We are all messed up in some way or another. Let me give you a couple of illustrations that I have found really helpful to understand the power, the tremendous power of this restoration.
I was reading a book not long ago by the American writer, Max Lucado. It was a book that was given to me when I spoke at a prayer breakfast for the Mayor in Richmond Hill some time ago. In it, Max tells the story of how his staff - and he wasn't the senior pastor at the time, he is now - decided to have a party. The only way you could go to the party was to bring some freshly baked cookies. If you didn't bring freshly baked cookies, you weren't allowed to come to the party. It was a cookie party.
Max had no idea how to turn an oven on, let alone make cookies! He thought that if he bought them it would be fraudulent, if he bought Pillsbury ones it wouldn't fool anybody, and he thought that it looked like he was not going to be able to go to the party because he just couldn't make the cookies. Then, he found a way out. But, I'll come back to that in a moment. Thinking more about those cookies for the party, he said, “You know, it seems like so many of us have that same attitude towards our relationship with God and to the life that God gives us.” We are not sure if we have the cookies to make it to the party. We are not sure that we are being let in to this great cosmic story of redemption, and that maybe we need something.
He describes what the ultimate end of the redemption is. He says it is life that is lived with God, and that it is like a great, ongoing banquet. Now, doesn't that just get your juices flowing? It is like a great, big banquet. This is the language that he uses to describe it:
God is planning a party. A party to end all parties! Not a cookie party, but a feast! Not giggles and chit-chat in the conference room, but wide-eyed wonder at the throne of God. Yes, the guest list is impressive. Your question to Jonah about undergoing a gut check in a fish gut, you will be able to ask him. But more impressive than the names of the guests is the nature of the guests: no egos, no power plays! Guilt, shame and sorrow will be checked at the gate. Disease, death and depression will be the black plagues of distant past. What we now see daily there we will never see and what we now see vaguely, there we will see clearly. We will see God, not by faith, not through the eyes of Moses or Abraham or David, not via Scripture or sunsets or summer rains. We will see not God's work or words, but we will see Him, for he is not the host of the party, He is the party. His goodness is the banquet. His voice is the music. His radiance is the light. And his love is the endless topic of discussion.
Wonderful!
Then, said Lucado, there is one problem: to get into this banquet you have to be righteous. And here is the dilemma. No matter how righteous we think we are when we compare ourselves to one another, we may think we are pretty good, but when we compare ourselves to God and Christ, we are not even close! “For all,” said Paul, “have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” Not one of us is righteous.
How do we get to the banquet? How do we get into God's holy presence? How are we lifted up? The answer is faith. This is how the Apostle Paul put it in that incredible letter that he wrote: “For we know it is by grace that you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing. It is the gift of God, not the result of works so that no one can boast.”
In other words, what God wants from us is faith. It is not that God doesn't want anything from us. He wants faith: faith in his Son, faith in the power of Resurrection, faith in the power of his life, faith in his words, faith in his covenanted promise. That is what Christ and God want from us. That is what we bring to the table. Faith. For it is by grace that the banquet is prepared; it is through faith that we enter it. We are not righteous on our own. If we were, we would boast. It is a gift from God that we have to accept by faith. There is more.
I was reading another story. It is a story about an Indian bazaar. At the bazaar, there were people who came from all over the countryside to sell their wares. They would sell horses and cattle and they would sell groceries and fish and all manner of things. There was one man who brought with him quails. What he did was he tied up all the quails by their feet and joined their feet to a central peg, and then the quails would walk around the central peg together in a circle. People would then choose which quail they wanted and would buy the quail. The others would keep walking tied to the central peg.
One day, a Brahmin came along. The Brahmin had concern for the state of the world and that all creatures are good and interconnected. He looks at this, goes up to the farmer and he says, “May I buy your quails?”
The farmer says, “What, all of them?”
The Brahmin says, “Yes, all of them.”
The farmer says, “Sure, by all means! Here you are! You can have them. They are yours!”
They exchange money and the Brahmin starts to cut all the cords that had been tying the quails to the central peg. His hope was that he would set them free and that having done so they would be able to go and live a much better life than they had and not face death. Everything seemed great. The only problem was that even after he cut them all free, the quails continued to walk around the peg following each other. Even when he tried to shoo them, they still kept walking around as they had known and did what they were used to. They didn't even know they were free!
I think humanity is like that. I think grace is what sets us free. I think grace is the way in which God says to us, “Go and soar and be free. Do not be constrained!” As our passage from Ephesians states, you were dead, you were following the course of the world, you were following your passions, you were going around and around, but God in his mercy, out of his great love for us, made us alive through Christ and set us free.
Our role then in all of this is to accept the freedom we have been given: freedom from the past, freedom from our sins, not for our sins, freedom from our nature in order that we might be able to follow God, freedom from the guilt that often binds us, freedom from the things that hold us back. Whether we are messed up of not, it is the freedom that Christ gives us and he gives it to us because he paid for the cookies to enter the banquet.
What are good works then? Paul does not here dismiss good works. He recognizes that good works do not make righteousness and do not get us in to the banquet. The good works that he speaks of are the works of those who now, from this moment on, participate in God's redemption plan for humanity. We now have a passion for the world and its restoration and out of that love and passion for the things of God that are on Earth as they are in heaven, so our works reflect the passion of our hearts and the passion of our faith.
Good works then are not a means of getting into the banquet; good works are a reflection of the banquet here on earth. And Christians are here in this world to make it a better place. We believe it is a better place when the sins of darkness are not lifted up. We believe that when the will of God is manifested the world is a better place. When we love the creation that we have been blessed with and brought into, when we love the messed up and we have a word of consolation for them, when we see the injustices of a broken world and we offer the option of a new life and a better kingdom, when we do not follow the “kingdom of the air” but we the Kingdom of the Lord, we believe that this world is a better place for those who understand the power of redemption.
The works are a product of our faith. Our faith is based on God's grace, and God's grace is everything for life. Amen.